The Watchman On The Wall

Eph 6:12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Verse 13 Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Netanyahu and the Golan Heights

Water is the critical element in any peace settlement

Friends,

Let me state it bluntly, those of you who think the 33 degree
Mason Netanyahu won’t give away Israel’s land are Verrucht! (crazy) Read the
story about Golan below. Notice my highlights.

Also when the Middle East peace treaty is confirmed by the
anti-christ all the walls in Israel will be torn down. When Israel is attacked
there will be no barriers to stop their enemies. Finally, notice the critical importance of water in the Middle East. 15% of Israel's water comes from the Golan. As I traveled through the region it clearly became evident to me that Jordan's army was protecting their water from the Yarmuk river that feeds Jordan's fertile agricultural region. Water is a critical element in these peace negotiations. Notice the Yarmuk river on the southern part of the map.

Israel’s newest wall snakes along its northern border, long the
country’s quietest, climbing over the mountains separating the Golan Heights
from Syria and across the grassy hills and plateaus separating it from Lebanon.
The barrier, already 60 kilometers long, is made of thick steel pillars and
coils of razor-sharp barbed wire, bolstered by some of the most sophisticated
cameras, motion detectors, and infrared surveillance equipment in the Israeli
arsenal.

The skies over the fence
are patrolled by a fleet of unarmed, Israeli-built Sky Rider drones that beam
real-time video imagery down to troops on the ground. An Israeli military
official boasted that the drones and surveillance equipment allow Israeli forces
to “see everything from a shepherd to a runaway sheep.” Every day, the Israeli
side of the wall is patrolled by hundreds of active-duty troops who have rushed
north in recent months to relieve the reservists who have long been assigned
the dull task of securing a border where nothing of note typically happens.

Responsibility for
maintaining quiet in northern Israel rests in the hands of men like Lt. Col.
Yogev Bar Sheshet, the commander of the infantry battalion with responsibility
for a swath of the Lebanese border not yet secured by the new fence. One
afternoon last week, Bar Sheshet climbed a ladder onto a concrete escarpment
next to a machine-gun nest ringed by sandbags and covered with camouflage
netting. The border was less than 10 meters away. To the left were tan
buildings housing some of the United Nations peacekeepers stationed along the
border; to the right, off in the distance, was a Lebanese army guard tower. A
chain link fence topped with a thin strand of barbed wire marked the limit of
Israeli control.

Bar Sheshet has been in
his job for a year and is convinced that unarmed Hezbollah operatives in
civilian clothing are constantly monitoring his base from the other side. “We
were always seeing shepherds, but then we noticed that there were three
shepherds for every sheep, and they all seemed to be carrying cameras,” he
said.

The Watchman studies a model of the region

The decision to double
the obstacles standing between troops like Bar Sheshet and the threats beyond
reflects Israel’s growing concern about the deteriorating situation in the
north. Israel believes that Hezbollah has more weaponry in Lebanon than
ever before and will turn its firepower onto Israel if their Iranian backers
give them the green light. But Israel’s chief worry these days is the
escalating civil war in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad has spent more
than two years fighting to maintain his grip on power.

Water, water everywhere but who shall possess it?

While the world’s
attention focuses on the West Bank and the Sinai, Israeli military commanders
believe the threat along the Golan border is far more pressing—and, thanks to
the infiltration of fighters allied with al-Nusra Front/al-Qaeda into Syria,
potentially far more dangerous. It’s a marked shift from just three years
ago, when a peace deal between Israel and Syria was reported to be a realistic
possibility.

Now the new fence is a
tangible reminder that the situation in the Golan Heights—which Israel captured
in the Six Day War—is unlikely to change anytime soon, if ever.

In 2010, the Israeli press reportedthat
Benjamin Netanyahu participated in secret talks with Syria over a comprehensive
peace treaty that would have involved a full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan,
which Israel annexed in 1981.The talks, according to the Israeli paperYediot
Ahronot, wereheldat Netanyahu’s official residence in
Jerusalem.

The Golan Heights allows
Israel to peer deep into Syria and monitor its troop movements. The area
also contributes roughly 15
percent of Israel’s water supply. Netanyahu’s willingness to part
with the Golan—if his participation in the talks was in earnest—likely would
have stemmed from a cool-eyed calculation that a treaty with Syria would lead
Assad to break with Iran, leaving Tehran with no Arab allies and making it more
difficult for Iran to send weapons and munitions to Hezbollah. Assad, for his
part, seemed interested in bolstering his political standing at home by
bringing home a prized piece of territory that his father had pursued,
unsuccessfully, for decades.

Netanyahu scopes out the Hezbollah positions from the Golan Heights

The talks were mediated by a pair of
American heavy-hitters: Dennis Ross, a top Barack Obama adviser on the Middle
East; and Frederic Hof, an experienced diplomat who had served as the State
Department’s special coordinator for Lebanon and Syria.
The two sides deadlocked over key details like the timetable for an Israeli
withdrawal—Syria wanted full control back within two years, while Israel said
it needed more time to dismantle the region’s military bases and towns—but
participants have said Netanyahu
was fully prepared tocedethe
entire Golan.

It
wouldn’t have been the first time an Israeli prime minister had proposed giving
back the territory as part of a peace deal. It wasn’t even the first time
Netanyahu did: According to Uri Saguy, the military intelligence officer who
conducted talks with the Syrians in 1999 under Ehud Barak, Netanyahu himself held secret
negotiations in 1998 with Bashar’s father and predecessor Hafez al-Assad about
swapping the Golan for a full peace treaty. Those talks had a
cloak-and-dagger element, with Netanyahu using American businessman Ronald
Lauder as his personal emissary to Assad. Lauder shuttled back and forth
between Damascus and Jerusalem with the proposals and counter-proposals; the
Israeli and Syrian negotiating teams never had direct contact. But the talks
fell apart,reportedlybecause the two sides couldn’t fully
resolve disputes over water,
early-warning stations, and other key details.

The last round of negotiations collapsed when the pro-democracy
uprisings of the Arab Spring flared up across the region in early 2011 and
quickly spread from Tunisia to Syria and other countries. (The Illuminati does not want peace between
Israel and Syria and it is the Illuminati that originated the Arab Spring.) Assad
refused to clearly commit to severing his ties to Iran, making the Israelis
worry that an agreement wouldn’t ultimately diminish Tehran’s regional standing
or force it to limit its relationship with Hezbollah. Netanyahu, for his part,
apparently concluded that Assad’s standing at home was falling so fast that he
wouldn’t be able to deliver on any promised deal. The talks ended in the summer
of 2011, just as the Syrian civil war was getting going, and never
resumed. Netanyahu, to this day, publicly denies that he was willing to
agree to a full withdrawal from the Golan.

In any event, the prospects of a deal have never looked more
remote. Even if Assad hangs on, Netanyahu or his successors are certain to be
skeptical about the wisdom of swapping some of Israel’s most strategically
important terrain for a treaty with a weakened leader who seems likely to fall
sooner rather than later.

At the moment it’s hard to imagine the leadership of either
country being willing to resume talks, let alone make the painful concessions
needed to actually make a deal happen. In the meantime, the Israelis are left
to counter the threat of jihadist groups taking advantage of the increasing exhaustion
and desperation of Syria’s pseudo rebels.

Israeli concerns center on a jihadist group called the al-Nusra
Front, which has pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda and begun mounting suicide
attacks deep inside Damascus and other major Syrian cities. Al-Nusra leaders
openly refer to Israel as an enemy of Islam, and Israeli officials worry that
the militants will eventually look across the border for new targets. The new
wall is meant to keep them out. “The situation has changed,” the Israeli military
official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the situation in
Syria. “Syria is becoming a hub for global terror groups. At the end of the day
we know they’ll eventually try to come into Israel and hit us.”

That leaves Israel rushing to complete the final 30 kilometers
of the security wall by the end of the year, at a total cost of more than $75
million—giving both shepherds and militants on the other side plenty to
photograph. Israeli construction crews are expected to arrive at Bar Sheshet’s
base in the next couple of months to put in one of the final sections of the
new security wall. The work, he says, can’t start soon enough. “The border
looks quiet now,” he says, pointing to the grass rustling softly on the
Lebanese side of the frontier. “But it can change in a hurry, in a flash.”